


this garden is good

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, M/M, and by we i mean beaujes, and the getting yasha back, but anyway, it's about the found family, it's about the found family being complete once yasha's back, listen we got fed this ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 07:40:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: this garden is good, caduceus says, and it’s the first night on the ocean that fjord doesn’t dream of eyes and cold and darkness. it’s a weightless, coddling thing, rocked in the belly of a ship once again, and he dreams of flowers opening on the sea, pale pink and clinging to the sides of the ship and to caduceus’s sides where he floats, face tipped to the sky and smiling, such the same color that fjord can’t tell where his hair ends and the flowers begin.(three things i wrote during/after ep 84)
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Fjord & Jester Lavorre & Beauregard Lionett & Nott & Caleb Widogast, Caduceus Clay/Fjord, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 4
Kudos: 84





	this garden is good

“i think jester likes fjord. and i think he likes her back.”

beau blinks, and behind her eyes she sees jester wilting like a late-summer bloom at the nails avantika trails along fjord’s arm when she passes, at the bite in fjord’s voice when he tells her to_ shut up about oskar, okay?_

jester crying into her pillow, muffled and hiccupy across the room. shoving tusk love angrily into the haversack.

tusk love not reappearing.

jester frowning when she comes back from talking with nott the night after the temple, still hoarse and shaky, breathing like someone aware at every moment of how easy it is_ not to be_. she crawls into beau’s bed that night after some minutes of tossing to match the sea, shoves her knees right up against the backs of beau’s and winds her arms around beau’s stomach.

she doesn’t ask about beau’s first kiss, but beau tells her anyway, lets jester pretend she’s already asleep.

“yeah, so um. it’s not the first one that matters, anyway. not if you don’t want it to.”

jester’s nails dig a little into her ribs, and she stifles a grunt.

-

“love you, jes.”

it’s not the last time she’ll say it, but she remembers it makes jester shake in a way that’d be easy to pass off as cold, rainwater snaking down between where jester’s pressed to her back, horns and all.

except, well, jester doesn’t get cold.

she wonders— her mind blank, in this moment, honest, of fjord and how jester has completely and totally shut up about him— if jester’s heard that from anyone besides her mom.

beau does get cold, see, was already shaking a bit from it— when jester says it back, close so she can feel her mouth forming the words against her spine, she goes still.

-

she looks down at nott and feels no jealousy. more things pass like quicksilver when she blinks again: jester watching her with moon-wide eyes in bazzoxan, jester tugging at the loop of the harness that had gone, infuriatingly, around her neck. finding it suddenly less infuriating when jester giggled. fjord shuffling his feet when cad talked to him low and rumbly about the wildmother. something holy and wholly unspoken passing between them.

jester’s hands twitching when beau stepped down into them from the donjon pillar, like she wished beau had fell after all. jester’s face after beau kissed reani, a deep and ruffled-looking purple. jester turning into an owl all of a sudden.

their shoved-together beds in the xhorhouse.

nugget curled up at the foot. the heavy looks she gets from marion lavorre when they visit.

it’s funny, is what it is. her jaw stays loose. _nott’s really smart, until she isn’t._

“oh, yeah?”

—

beau and jester have to sleep really weird that night to keep off their tattoos. beau doesn’t take her hair down like she usually does and is lying facedown instead of on her side, and jester, who’s just trying to sleep sitting up, is a little sad because sleeping with her hair down is the softest she ever sees beau. her shoulders prickle— she knows, on some level, that momma could never be mad at her, but it feels so permanent to show her another way jester’s changing without her. another way she’s becoming something else, something she’s scared momma won’t recognize. a disguise she can’t take off when momma asks to see her daughter.

beau snores then, her hand twitching loosely where it’s held in jester’s, and she watches the all-seeing eye shift with her breathing and tries to remember that she’s not changing alone.

-

nott is only up long enough to crawl into bed, and caleb spends that night worrying over whether it’s better to try and wash her face or not. jester tells him that nott passed out during and he pushes down the part of himself that thinks nott shouldn’t have done it, because it’s what she wanted, and if it helps her feel more like herself, more pretty, more deserving, he’ll shove aside the itching under the skin of his forearms whenever he thinks about marks and their permanence. just keep the swelling down, and wait til morning.

-

_this garden is good_, caduceus says, and it’s the first night on the ocean that fjord doesn’t dream of eyes and cold and darkness. it’s a weightless, coddling thing, rocked in the belly of a ship once again, and he dreams of flowers opening on the sea, pale pink and clinging to the sides of the ship and to caduceus’s sides where he floats, face tipped to the sky and smiling, such the same color that fjord can’t tell where his hair ends and the flowers begin.

—

caduceus walks a little different after the fight with the inevitable end.

it’s not every day you get stabbed in the back with a poisoned dagger out of nowhere, even for them, and even with divine healing and the grace of the wildmother, something about it is never quite the same. he walks a little stiffer, leans on his staff different, sighs and pops his spine when they rest for the night. he’s not old, not for a firbolg, but his body’s been around much longer than that of his friends, and it spent so very long untouched by the venom beyond the savalirwood. it’s okay, he was never the fastest anyway, but there’s no coming away from hunting down betrayer gods unscathed.

fjord pats him on the back and he flinches a bit too hard— he draws his hand back like he’d set caduceus on fire, and his eyebrows draw together and stay that way for the rest of the day. he can’t do much healing yet, and it never goes quite as deep as caduceus’s own, or jester’s, but caduceus lets him try anyway that night on watch, hands spread tentatively below his shoulder blades.

“any better?” fjord asks, gravelly, and caduceus just takes one fading hand and smiles.

“in a different way.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi, i'm @seafleece on tumblr!


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